1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a heater device of a portable cigarette lighter using a lighting system in which a cigarette which is allowed to come proximately in contact with the lighter is lit by the heat generated by heaters connected to dry batteries cells as a power source, and relates to a method of manufacturing the heater device.
2. Background Art
Heretofore, such cigarette lighters have included gas lighters and oil lighters using gas and oil as a fuel, respectively. The systems for lighting these fuels, in particular, gas fuels (such as butane gas bottled at a high pressure) include the flint system, the piezoelectric system, and the system of generating a spark using batteries as a power source. These cigarette lighters have a problem in that a flame is allowed to develop by lighting a fuel (in a vaporized state), so that flame may be difficult to develop because of wind and the like when they are used outdoors. Therefore, some systems use a grill-shaped heater which is provided in a hood to protect the flame from wind and to make it stable, and to improve the cigarette lighting ability, thereby heating the heater by the flame from the inside of the hood.
These cigarette lighters, which fill the fuel supply with butane gas pressurized and liquified at a high pressure and use the gas as a fuel as previously described, have the associated danger of flammability at all times. They employ a structure in which a fuel at a high pressure is sealed by a nozzle or a sealer, so that the fuel might blow out from a very narrow gap which develops in the nozzle or sealer, and that blown out fuel is apt to catch fire to cause a burn. On the other hand, in these portable cigarette lighters, when a fuel supply is used up, it is necessary to discard the lighter itself and purchase another, while in those lighters employing a structure into which fuel ca be filled, providing such a fuel filling structure might increase their product cost, and cause the fuel gas to be apt to diffuse in the air when the fuel supply is refilled.
Therefore, the present applicant previously proposed a safe cigarette lighter which uses no fuel (see Japanese Utility Model Application Nos. 1-133531, 3-34701). The cigarette lighter has a composition in which heaters are connected through a switching section to a power source section comprising dry cell batteries, and when the switching section is closed, a closed circuit is formed to cause the heaters to generate heat, providing a portable compact lighter in which a cigarette which has been allowed to come proximately in contact with the lighter is lit by the heat generated by the heaters, and the circuit uses two small-size batteries suitable for carrying such as R6 size (AA size), R03 size (AAA size) and R1 size (N size) batteries as dry cell batteries in the power source section.
In the aforementioned cigarette lighters using no fuel, it has been desired to improve the cigarette lighting ability. In these cigarette lighters, one heater has been arranged in correspondence with tobacco for the head of a cigarette inserted through the inserting port of a casing, thereby causing inferior lighting ability and thus a flame been hardly developed.
Therefore, although an attempt has been made to increase the number of conventional heaters, to connect them in parallel to each other, and then to connect them to their power source, the heat generating state of each heater has become worse such that each heater has not become red-hot, this is unlike the case where one heater has been used. Further, the lighting ability has been deteriorated, and the power supply condition has not been checked visually, causing the life of the battery cell to be considerably shortened.